"They don't look grungy...I mean, they could cut their hair..."
March 25, 2014 10:59 AM   Subscribe

 
"Huh huh, Dave Grohl with a ponytail." Classic.
posted by Gronk at 11:07 AM on March 25, 2014 [6 favorites]


The kids are alright.
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:09 AM on March 25, 2014 [16 favorites]


I watched this last night and was pleasantly surprised.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:11 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


GOOD NEWS: great art remains timeless and does not age, even if you do (and what is up with that grey hair growing out of your ear, anyhow)
posted by mightygodking at 11:11 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


The laziest form of youtube commentary.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:12 AM on March 25, 2014


I don't understand, did they expect the same outcome as the rotary phone video that was posted a few weeks ago? Like did they make this anticipating the kids saying "WHAT THIS IS NOT SKRILLEX SO CONFUSED BY EVERYTHING"? Nirvana is still hugely popular, known, and relevant especially with teenagers, did people not think this?

If they played tracks from something that had a little less mass radio play but with equal critical acclaim (something like...OK Computer) - that would be so much more interesting to see.
posted by windbox at 11:13 AM on March 25, 2014 [6 favorites]


I remember I almost bought "Nevermind", knowing nothing of the band, just because of the cover art. How cool would that have been? Oh I could have been a contender. I probably bought a Joni Mitchell album or something instead.
posted by thelonius at 11:13 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Just wait until they get a load of Huey Lewis & the News.
posted by mullacc at 11:14 AM on March 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


Metafilter: Even though it's kind of like yelling, it's still relaxing.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2014 [13 favorites]


It's interesting that Nirvana is still well-known and well-liked, but that "grunge" itself as a movement isn't nearly as well-remembered.

It's striking that the "Heart-Shaped Box" video is much weirder than most videos being made today, especially in the use of the Jesus and Klan imagery, without any hint of irony or even humor.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


"I'm pretty bomb on this on Guitar Hero"

On description, I totally expected this to be the first time I told kids to get off my lawn, but these kids can come over and trash the place when I'm not home anytime.

"He was like really attractive and that's creepy because he's dead."

I know, right?!?!?

"I love this song too. These are all frickin' kick ass songs."

"They sound the same when they're live"

she said, far too impressed.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2014 [15 favorites]


I don't understand, did they expect the same outcome as the rotary phone video that was posted a few weeks ago?

Doubtful, considering that the Teens React series has them reacting to current stuff as well (the Gangnam Style reaction video is amusing, for example). Basically, the entire point is "this is what teens think about this thing." In this case it's a little relevant because while the kids might have heard the songs, they're less likely to have seen the videos.
posted by mightygodking at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


GOOD NEWS: great art remains timeless and does not age, even if you do

I'd like to see a "Teens React to Pink Floyd" or "Teens React to Led Zeppelin." I liked a lot of 70s rock when I was growing up in the 90s, and I wonder if contemporary teenager would still have the same reaction as I did at that age.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 11:20 AM on March 25, 2014 [11 favorites]


If they played tracks from something that had a little less mass radio play but with equal critical acclaim (something like...OK Computer) - that would be so much more interesting to see

Do Cute Kids Like Radiohead?
posted by Rhaomi at 11:21 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


BTW: everyone should read Something Awful's Call of Cthulhu Cobain series.

"We last left our intrepid party of investigators - Kurt Cobain, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, and Eazy-E - in the early 1990s having dealt with a serial-killing cult of flame-monster Tulzscha. It is now 1992, a presidential election year, and things seem relatively quiet. But a surprise third-party presidential candidate is gaining serious traction with a platform of "nuking the Arabs." Unless the investigators can stop him and his sinister agenda, Morton Downey Jr. just might become the next president of the US of freaking A."
posted by Iridic at 11:21 AM on March 25, 2014 [6 favorites]


I feel so conflicted about the 1990's nostalgia happening at the moment.

Like, even at the time, at least from my shitty vantage point in Ft. Worth, TX, this whole "alternative" "movement" was just so clearly a corporate scam. Another coopted identity invented in part or in whole by the vast entertainment complex in order to move CDs and SPIN Magazines and MTV commercial spots. I mean, there was nothing subtle about it.

And it weirds me out so hard that "kids today" are looking back to that era as a vanguard era of authenticity. I don't wanna crush nobody's dreams, but while there was some truly great great great music being made and publicized, I remember being paranoically suspicious of the whole damn thing even at 16 and I can't have been the only one. I mean, it all turned pretty crass pretty quickly, right?

Oh well, whatever, nvm.
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas at 11:22 AM on March 25, 2014 [22 favorites]


I'd like to see a "Teens React to Pink Floyd" or "Teens React to Led Zeppelin hey now I saw this happen in real time when my brother entered high school.
posted by The Whelk at 11:23 AM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


Two separate tweens visiting my books-and-music-and-stuff store recently have made me facepalm yet really enjoy them:

Encountering kid 1: "Where are your Kurt Cobain CDs?" Me: "Do mean Nirvana, or some solo thing, or...?" Kid: "No, the singer Kurt Cobain." Me: "You mean the Nirvana singer?" Kid: "NO, Kurt Cobain." She'd never heard of Nirvana.

And then kid 2: "Where are your Kurt Cobain albums?" Me, not even arguing this time: "Nirvana's over here." Kid giving an expert music lecture en route: "He's dead now, but Kurt Cobain was so cool. He was the lead singer of Nirvana. Have you heard of Nirvana?" I startled both of us with how quickly I whirled around to stare incredulously at him.

Bless them and their awesome modern tweenity, though. When I was their age, I vaguely knew of but had never listened to (for example) the Rolling Stones, and I definitely wasn't in stores asking for John Lennon albums. And I had NEVER heard of Nirvana.
posted by nicebookrack at 11:26 AM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


Like, even at the time, at least from my shitty vantage point in Ft. Worth, TX, this whole "alternative" "movement" was just so clearly a corporate scam. Another coopted identity invented in part or in whole by the vast entertainment complex in order to move CDs and SPIN Magazines and MTV commercial spots. I mean, there was nothing subtle about it.

Wow. The '90s are back!

You should totally put that in a "zine."

Oh my god I just put quote marks around the word zine cuz kids won't get it.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:26 AM on March 25, 2014 [26 favorites]


I'd like to see a "Teens React to Pink Floyd" or "Teens React to Led Zeppelin

They do have a "Kids react to The Beatles".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:27 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


I was these kids' age when Nevermind was originally released, which means if there had been an equivalent of this series back then, I would have been opining about songs from the White Album, Beggars Banquet, or the Village Green Preservation Society. Yikes.
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:28 AM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


I liked this. Most of the "Kids React" videos I've seen seem to be aiming for wide-eyed bewilderment. It was heartening in this one to see that great music transcends generations (although I suppose that shouldn't exactly be a revelation - the Beatles broke up before I was born, but it's not as if their music is this strange, mysterious, elusive relic of another time or anything).

I'm glad they picked a slightly older group of kids for this video, who I thought spoke rather intelligently and thoughtfully about suicide, celebrity culture, authenticity and the difficulty of balancing the sometimes contradictory forces of art and commerce.

(Although "He was, like, really attractive. That's really creepy 'cause he's dead" is my new favorite quote)
posted by The Gooch at 11:29 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


That one incredulous girl - "Was this actually on TV?"

Yes, dear. In the distant past, music channels played music videos.
posted by cmyk at 11:30 AM on March 25, 2014 [9 favorites]


I love the kid in the red shirt who's just totally into it.

That said, I can barely listen to Nirvana right now because as we approach the twentieth anniversary of Kurt's death I'm just consumed with sadness. I'm a little surprised by how raw it still feels. I was in grad school, and I still remember walking in the front door of my house and my roommate in tears in front of MTV, and all she said was "he finally did it." And I knew what had happened, and I wasn't surprised, but I still fell to the floor and fucking wept.
posted by scody at 11:31 AM on March 25, 2014 [19 favorites]


Like, even at the time, at least from my shitty vantage point in Ft. Worth, TX, this whole "alternative" "movement" was just so clearly a corporate scam. Another coopted identity invented in part or in whole by the vast entertainment complex in order to move CDs and SPIN Magazines and MTV commercial spots. I mean, there was nothing subtle about it.

I'd save that pushback for when the kids start lionizing Candlebox.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:31 AM on March 25, 2014 [18 favorites]


That's really only scary if you would have said something other than "Village Green Preservation Society is awesome." It's fine as long as teenage you isn't going to lie.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:32 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


LET'S START SLOWLY CRANKING UP THE DIFFICULTY

Episode 2: Notorious B.I.G., "Hypnotize"
Episode 3: Faith No More, "Epic"
Episode 4: New Order, "True Faith"
Episode 5: Pet Shop Boys, "Opportunities"
Episode 6: Sisters Of Mercy, "This Corrosion"
Episode 7: Billy Ocean, "Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car"

I love each and every one of these videos and songs
posted by furiousthought at 11:34 AM on March 25, 2014 [17 favorites]


It's no fair using a still-popular, well known bang/song. You need something that was widely popular and completely gone now, something that could only exist for one precious season in 1991.
posted by The Whelk at 11:37 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


without any hint of irony or even humor.

I'm fairly certain everything Nirvana did (especially "In Utero") was drenched in irony and self-depreciating humor. They did not take themselves nearly as seriously as people seem to think. Hell, "Heart-Shaped Box" is ostensibly Kurt satirizing his own popularity and the popularity of grunge itself ("I got a new complaint").
posted by spiderskull at 11:40 AM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


It's amazing how much airplay songs from 1990 forward still get on the radio. In 1994, the stations that were playing Nirvana were not playing rock from 1974. Today the stations playing the crap out of modern rock go back to 1991 as their cutoff point.
posted by graymouser at 11:41 AM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


They should do Lionel Richie "Hello" because you'd seriously have be living under a rock to not be familiar with Nirvana but bad 80s pop seems to be largely forgotten by the youth of today.
posted by vuron at 11:41 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


You need something that was widely popular and completely gone now, something that could only exist for one precious season in 1991.

A suggestion.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 11:44 AM on March 25, 2014 [11 favorites]


You need something that was widely popular and completely gone now, something that could only exist for one precious season in 1991.

Color Me Badd?
posted by Diablevert at 11:45 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


It's no fair using a still-popular, well known bang/song. You need something that was widely popular and completely gone now, something that could only exist for one precious season in 1991.
posted by The Whelk at 1:37 PM on March 25


EMF, "Unbelievable"
posted by joannemerriam at 11:45 AM on March 25, 2014 [27 favorites]


The past if fairly digestable when put into context. I watched 'Yacht Rock' and I was able to completely make sense of smooth music of the 70's and 80's.
posted by vicx at 11:46 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Weird, even when this video was new, my friends and I were already complaining about the lack of actual music videos on MTV.
posted by mkb at 11:46 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


You need something that was widely popular and completely gone now, something that could only exist for one precious season in 1991.

Toad the Wet Sprocket?
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 11:46 AM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


I was hoping that Bel Biv Devoe Poison was from 1991 because I still love that song but unfortunately it's actually from 1990.
posted by vuron at 11:49 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Great quote from one of the really little kids in the Beatles version (linked to by EmpressCallipygos above), regarding the people in the crowd during the Hey Jude video:

"Why do they have to, like, pay lots of money and go and see them? Can't they just listen to the songs on iPod?"
posted by Flunkie at 11:49 AM on March 25, 2014


EMF, "Unbelievable"

also Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now"
posted by furiousthought at 11:49 AM on March 25, 2014 [16 favorites]


EMF, "Unbelievable"

I classify this as one-hit wonder, but actually anything but moribund. In fact, last time I DJ-ed for a "younger" crowd, it kept a packed dance floor packed.

also Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now"

whereas, just thinking about this feels kind of embarrassing.
posted by philip-random at 11:51 AM on March 25, 2014 [13 favorites]


To be fair to the teens, I lived through a lot of the alternates suggested here as a teen or pre-teen and still have trouble believing they are real some days.

(And for the record, I believe EMF's "Unbelievable" and Jesus Jones's "Right Here, Right Now" are tied for most of-the-moment-and-only-of-the-moment songs of 1991 in the US.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:51 AM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


Ha!
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:51 AM on March 25, 2014


So awkward.

I can only imagine that the 'high school experience' has changed just enough since it came out that the abstracted depiction in the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit (and in the mumbled lyrics too) is totally unrecognizable to teens. Even the on-message title of the song doesn't make sense unless they still make that brand of deodorant?

Teens, listen! It's harder to recognize 25 years down the road, but this song is about you.
posted by carsonb at 11:52 AM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


I guess you guys thought of the same song

right here


right now
posted by The Whelk at 11:52 AM on March 25, 2014 [12 favorites]


It's interesting that Nirvana is still well-known and well-liked, but that "grunge" itself as a movement isn't nearly as well-remembered.

Well you had to have lived through the musical desert known as the 1980s to really appreciate it. Show these teens ten hours of Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran and THEN record their reaction to Nirvana.
posted by three blind mice at 11:53 AM on March 25, 2014 [16 favorites]


I feel like it's unfortunate that Jesus Jones got stuck with the one hit wonder tag for Right Here Right Now because honestly that was by far one of the weakest songs off Doubt. I could still listen to that album.
posted by vuron at 11:54 AM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


This link lead me to "Elders react to Eminem".

Good stuff.
posted by el io at 11:55 AM on March 25, 2014


Nirvana is still in heavy rotation on the local ClearChannel rock affiliate here in the DC area; you'd have to really be out of touch with mainstream culture to not have run across it, even if you couldn't identify the band by sound alone.

It's amazing how much airplay songs from 1990 forward still get on the radio.

Very true. Although I have noticed that some of the "Hot AC" stations that I remember being "best of the 70s, 80s, and today!" format stations in the 90s (primarily this one) are now advertising "80s, 90s, and today!" as though they have a sort of sliding-window period looking back ~30 years and that's it.

It'll be interesting to see if 80s rock falls out of rotation in the next year or so, as we get into the second half of the second decade of the 00s, meaning you can't really say "80s, 90s, and today" without having "today" encompass more than 15 years, which is awkward.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:55 AM on March 25, 2014


right here


right now


further to my previous comment, I don't think this would be a bad choice at all for a TEENS-REACT thing. Because the record really does touch on a historically specific moment. I just happen to feel right here right now (with the benefit of hindsight) that it's a very dumb record.
posted by philip-random at 11:57 AM on March 25, 2014


Oh yeah, also for the record, Doubt and Schubert Dip may have one single that have become hugely 1990s nostalgia jokes, but I have also listened to both albums again within the past year non-ironically and remembered why younger me was so taken.

(That said, I may be a hugely 1990s nostalgia joke.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:58 AM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


If you're gonna talk "Right Here, Right Now," you also have to talk "Winds of Change."
posted by entropicamericana at 11:58 AM on March 25, 2014 [9 favorites]


"such a shame."

Truth buddy, truth.
posted by Sreiny at 12:00 PM on March 25, 2014


Wow Spin Doctors Pocket full of Kryptonite was also in 1991. Can't beat Two Princes for inane rock pop anthems.
posted by vuron at 12:01 PM on March 25, 2014 [13 favorites]


If you want to give me an earworm, you can go to hell now vuron
posted by The Whelk at 12:02 PM on March 25, 2014 [12 favorites]


I feel like it's unfortunate that Jesus Jones got stuck with the one hit wonder tag for Right Here Right Now because honestly that was by far one of the weakest songs off Doubt.

I felt so alone until I saw this. They were a really good exponent of their underappreciated electro-rock genre. Yes, I did have three--count 'em, three--JJ albums* and even wrote in to their fan club to request a lyric sheet.

*At first I wrote "CDs" and then realized that actually it was the previous now-outmoded recording technology (cassette tapes!) that I own(ed) them on.

posted by psoas at 12:02 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]



And it weirds me out so hard that "kids today" are looking back to that era as a vanguard era of authenticity. I don't wanna crush nobody's dreams, but while there was some truly great great great music being made and publicized, I remember being paranoically suspicious of the whole damn thing even at 16 and I can't have been the only one. I mean, it all turned pretty crass pretty quickly, right?


But what is so great is that these things are given new meaning - or "time turns our lies to truths", as Gene Wolfe - that conservative catholic - wrote somewhere.

For example: back when I was a mere slip of a girl, it was a big deal that Chumbawamba sold out and signed to a major label. Their single "Tubthumper" was laughed out of punkdom and it became virtually unacceptable to play their older music unless you prefaced it with a giant caveat about how you liked their first albums when they were on an independent label and could not believe what hypocrites they'd become, anarchists on a major, etc. And actually, it turns out that signing to EMI was not a very good move for the Chumbas - did not make them rich or [as they had hoped] politically influential, lost much of their original fan base, etc. It took them a long time to rebuild a different fan base. (FTR, they seem to be a good group of people - and everyone I've met who has met them thinks highly of them.)

But anyway - time passes. It's 2008. We are on the edge of downtown St. Paul. It's the "Funk The War" march at the 2008 Republican National Convention. We are about to get teargassed and beat down, but we don't know that yet - I suspect it, but I'm much much the oldest person at the march and have been beat down before. (In about an hour, my well-honed "oil on out after shit goes down but before the beating becomes indiscriminate" skills will allow me to remove myself and two friends from the situation, avoiding arrest, chemical burns and bruises.)

We're marching. There is a sound system. (And you haven't seen bizarre until you've watched tear gas cannisters flying to the diagetic sound of "Build Me Up Buttercup"....but that's still ahead of us.) So all these kids - these little kids, these twenty year olds - they're all marching along, they've already been sold out by informants, three years of legal trouble and trumped up charges and light ptsd are just around the corner, all for a bunch of high school students and college freshman who want to stop the war...And someone has put "Tubthumper" on the sound system, and the kids know the whole chorus, they're all singing it. "I get knocked down, but I get up again! They're never gonna keep me down!"

Time turns our lies to truths.
posted by Frowner at 12:02 PM on March 25, 2014 [50 favorites]


But entropicamericana the Scorpions always sucked. Being a footnote on history is probably too good for them.
posted by vuron at 12:06 PM on March 25, 2014


I want to see Teens React to DEVO. But without playing Whip It.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


I suspect many of these "teens react to [song from 1985-1995]" videos can be summarized as "teens hear the entire song from that Hyundai/Arby's/Old Navy commercial."
posted by griphus at 12:13 PM on March 25, 2014 [6 favorites]


I was in grad school, and I still remember walking in the front door of my house and my roommate in tears in front of MTV, and all she said was "he finally did it." And I knew what had happened, and I wasn't surprised, but I still fell to the floor and fucking wept.

I was out of the US for most of the Nirvana arc. I'd read about them, and knew that they were the "voice of my generation," but had never actually heard them. The first time I did my reaction, in all innocence, was: "this sounds like a guy who's ready to kill himself."

People in the bar started crying. I knew that I hit a nerve and that I needed to shut up right away. I think it was another ten years before I finally listened to Nirvana and understood them. In a way I related to these kids, even though I was coming at the band from the other end of the age spectrum.
posted by kanewai at 12:13 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


6'15 "In the future there's going to be that band that's gonna tie all rock'n roll together"

WILD STALLYNS!
posted by popcassady at 12:18 PM on March 25, 2014 [15 favorites]


Teens reacting to music that has survived the decaying forces of time is no fun.
I want to see teens react to singles that were wildly popular, but no one will admit to purchasing.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 12:22 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


I don't think these kids are actually teenagers at this moment- I'm pretty sure the guy with the red shirt and the stoner hair sat next to me in algebra.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:22 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


This seems like a good thread in which to show off my new t-shirt. Which nobody in my office gets. [banging head on desk]
posted by FelliniBlank at 12:23 PM on March 25, 2014 [44 favorites]


Lots of good stuff in that video, the kids are doing OK, etc. Now I'm sad because after that one girl learned that he committed suicide, her reaction was "Why??? Oh, my heart, it hurts." And then I read scody's comment. It's easy to forget just how raw and painful that whole period was. He really was that guy who gave voice to everyone who felt disaffected and out of step with their culture. It's a timeless thing that he communicated, and god, the heartbreak when the news came out.

Two songs in that period that sum up those years after: Tori Amos' "Smells Like Teen Spirit" cover (that was recorded in 1992, but got lots of play after his death), and - now totally forgotten, but an excellent song - For Squirrels' Mighty K.C. Shit was rough, an entire generation in need of therapy from that one guy, man.
posted by naju at 12:25 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


But entropicamericana the Scorpions always sucked.

not always


everything was better in 1972
posted by philip-random at 12:30 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


20 years. damn.

It's worse for you kids, today. You don't even have the good music like we had to cope! You have shitty music. When the one guy was like "I wish we had music like this..." It reminded me of the whole "I'm 12 and I wish I was born back then so I could have grown up in that era!" But I liked that kid. I could dig that he could dig it. And that alternative girl. If I were a kid, I think those would be my 2 buds.

What was Wesley Crusher doing in that video?

April... Kurt died. My friend Emma was murdered in 97 in April. Terence McKenna... 3 people important to me who had influence on my life died in April. It's a tough month.
posted by symbioid at 12:36 PM on March 25, 2014


Pretty much like teen reacted in 1991.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:36 PM on March 25, 2014


That's how I reacted to them when I was 13, in 1993.
posted by ReeMonster at 12:36 PM on March 25, 2014


Also - I wish it would've been the little kids. The little kids with this music would've made more sense, cuz it would've blown their little tiny brains!
posted by symbioid at 12:37 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


> Can't beat Two Princes for inane rock pop anthems

But it's such a sad song.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:38 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


"Hey! They used that in that one song by Jay-Z. They stole that."

I'm glad I don't have to deal with kids much. *shakes cane menacingly*
posted by DigDoug at 12:39 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


While in many ways Pandora kind of sucks*, it can be highly amusing to seed it with a particular band and listen to what comes out over the course of a few hours. I suggest adding only "The Fixx" as a seed for a pure early 1980s time travel experience--one where you don't regret too much not being able to travel back in time for reals.

* Why do I ever hear repeated songs in the same four hour block, or why the same three songs from an artist with hundreds of tracks available? How come so many songs are uninspired live versions? No one listening to radio as background music wants to hear live recordings.
posted by maxwelton at 12:40 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Incidentally - I'm offended that "alternative" was considered an incorrect answer.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:40 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


The first time I did my reaction, in all innocence, was: "this sounds like a guy who's ready to kill himself."

It's definitely evident in the studio albums, but the moment that really makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck is the wail he gives at the end of their performance of Where Did You Sleep Last Night (right around 4:40). I'm not sure that I've ever heard anything that matches its sense of dread and yearning for death.
posted by scody at 12:45 PM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


"Hey! They used that in that one song by Jay-Z. They stole that."

Thats just about everything by Jay-Z.
posted by lkc at 12:48 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


I was in my late teens when Nirvana was .. well, breaking new grounds. I listened to them, but I also listened to David Bowie, 60s-era Stones, Beatles, and Byrds. Was this unusual? I don't know if it was - I just grew up in a multi-generational environment and was always exposed to all sorts of things (I also really loved Capitol-era Sinatra and Songbook-era Ella Fitzgerald - I know for a fact that was considered weird by my peers).

As much as I still remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard of Cobain's suicide (good grief, watching Ray Cokes on MTV Most Wanted) - somehow it's the 20-year-anniversary of Jeff Buckley's "Grace" and how Buckley only really left that one completed album* that gets me more. It's a totally personal thing.

*) although the vaults have been goddamn mined since then.
posted by kariebookish at 12:49 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


three blind mice: "It's interesting that Nirvana is still well-known and well-liked, but that "grunge" itself as a movement isn't nearly as well-remembered.

Well you had to have lived through the musical desert known as the 1980s to really appreciate it. Show these teens ten hours of Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran and THEN record their reaction to Nirvana.
"

Less Duran Duran/Flock of Seagulls and more "Poison" and "Warrant"... I mean really that's what it was a reaction to. Late 80s? Those guys were long gone (well Duran Duran may have been still kicking it)...

But really the huge shit then was Winger and Slaughter and all that hair metal bullshit. The coolest thing to come out of that era just before Nirvana was Faith No More. Jane's Addiction had Caught Stealing just a touch before the Grunge thing, too, I suppose. But yeah, while my friends apparently ate that shitty glam stuff up, I had no taste for it. I knew that metal should be fucking METAL. I was down with Metallica (keep in mind, this was pre-Black Album). I was down with DRI and thrash...

So when Nirvana came on the radio, my god. I was a country boy, I had no MTV, no cable to be exposed to. So when I heard this clanging jangly riff and the vocals, the raw rough vocals screaming out, not the falsetto "baby let's do it all night!" bullshit of glam rock, I knew I had to figure out who the hell it was.

The one other song that had that effect on my young mind was MARRS with "Pump Up the Volume." Coming out of a lot of the mid-80s crap (Duran Duran's Notorious never turned me on the way Reflex did. There was some Fresh Prince, around that time, but there was just so much bad shit...

Shake You Down
Here I Go Again
Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now (look, I like Starship for their cheese, but let's face it... it sucks)
Lady in Red? Tiffany? Ugh.

But MARRS. DEAR GOD! That tribal vocal? The rapping! GOD DAMN!

Apart from those two events on the radio, I really don't know if I was ever shocked and excited in a pure "THIS IS THE FUCKING SHIT!" way.

Autechre's One Bad Vilbel video did that for me when I first heard it, but that was much later, and it was also video, not radio. But I would say that that was the last time I ever had that experience in such a jarring way.
posted by symbioid at 12:50 PM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


"And it weirds me out so hard that "kids today" are looking back to that era as a vanguard era of authenticity. I don't wanna crush nobody's dreams, but while there was some truly great great great music being made and publicized, I remember being paranoically suspicious of the whole damn thing even at 16 and I can't have been the only one. I mean, it all turned pretty crass pretty quickly, right?"

Psst. You know that the Summer of Love and Woodstock and hippies, most of that was marketing bullshit too, right?
posted by klangklangston at 12:50 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


> Just wait until they get a load of Huey Lewis & the News.

The other day I read an interview with a DJ/producer type who appeared to be in his early 20s and he (non-ironically) name-dropped The Doobie Brothers, Toto, Air Supply and Michael McDonald as artists he loved and whose sound he wanted to emulate in the recording studio. Saying this out loud in the '90s would have gotten you laughed out of the room, but that's the thing about culture. Yesterday's laughingstocks are tomorrow's hip touchstones.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:50 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Episode 7: Billy Ocean, "Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car"

Episode 8, either Men Without Hats, "The Safety Dance" or Slade, "Run Runaway"
Episode 9, Dio, "The Last in Line."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:51 PM on March 25, 2014


"And now I'm ready to see them do something a little more challenging. "

Teens React to Merzbow and Keith Vandermark
posted by klangklangston at 12:55 PM on March 25, 2014 [14 favorites]


"Fry you can't spend all your time in the dark listening to classical music."
posted by griphus at 12:55 PM on March 25, 2014 [10 favorites]


Nirvana was formative as hell, but Ween's "Push Th' Little Daisies" from '92 blew my mind in an equal way back then. I'd love to see teens react to that song and video!
posted by naju at 12:58 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


The 90's are back? Should I put my "Processed World" zines up for auction?

Wow Spin Doctors Pocket full of Kryptonite was also in 1991
Did you ever notice that you can sing any Spin Doctors song to "Sweet Home Alabama", and it works fine?
posted by thelonius at 12:59 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Teens React to Krautrock

"Those guys in Kraftwerk are kind of cute, which is creepy, because they're dressed like robots."

"Hey! Neu got that from Jay-Z!"
posted by scody at 12:59 PM on March 25, 2014 [10 favorites]


Teens React To Current 93
posted by philip-random at 1:05 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Are you legally allowed to show minors that one Butthole Surfers home video
posted by naju at 1:06 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Teens React to Negativland
posted by furiousthought at 1:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [15 favorites]


And it weirds me out so hard that "kids today" are looking back to that era as a vanguard era of authenticity.

I guess, but I think that in the 90s, we had a similar over-reverent attitude to the album rock of the 70s. Now that I'm an adult -- and especially to the degree that the internet acts as an omnipresent archive of everything ever, so you can just go read old Rolling Stone reviews if you want -- I know that a lot of that was just as commercial and pre-meditated and stupid as the bands we thought were "sellouts" back then.

Like, at 17, I'd hear "Stairway to Heaven" and think it was super deep. I hear it now and think it's a joke.
posted by Sara C. at 1:08 PM on March 25, 2014


Teens React To Current 93

Don't tease me like that!

Now I really do want this to be a thing, but with the interviewer telling the teenagers that Current 93 were really huge back in the 90s and that you could hardly escape them on the radio.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:10 PM on March 25, 2014 [10 favorites]


Teens React to Negativland

"What's the Soviet Union?"

I kid, young people of today, I kid!
posted by scody at 1:10 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


I would have been opining about songs from the White Album

I actually remember being a young teen and my parents playing the White Album for me for the first time. Granted, they are on the young end of the Boomer years and were not the Beatles' prime demographic, but, yeah. I hope they laughed really hard about it in private.
posted by Sara C. at 1:11 PM on March 25, 2014


I wonder what happened to the bee girl in that video with the girl in the bee outfit and coke bottle glasses. Pop culture in the 90s was so weird.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:16 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Teens react to 311: "hey, my mom and dad went on their cruise!"
posted by mullacc at 1:17 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


I wonder what happened to the bee girl

Heather DeLoach
posted by scody at 1:18 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


I love the kid in the red shirt who's just totally into it.

Me too, but I feel kind of sorry for him, because he was obviously born 25 years too late.

I wonder what happened to the bee girl in that video with the girl in the bee outfit and coke bottle glasses.

I vaguely remember a rumor/urban legend that she died some sort of tragic death. Am I making it up?
posted by mudpuppie at 1:18 PM on March 25, 2014


I wonder what happened to the bee girl in that video with the girl in the bee outfit and coke bottle glasses. Pop culture in the 90s was so weird.

Would you like to know more?
posted by jquinby at 1:18 PM on March 25, 2014


Hot Young Teens React Slaveringly to the Scent of Your Aged Blood
posted by psoas at 1:19 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


But entropicamericana the Scorpions always sucked.

not always


everything was better in 1972
posted by philip-random at 10:30 PM
Indeed, I still love this record!
For me Scorpions are defined by this, and I refuse to recognize any later albums.

I might be prejudiced, being german and having a dad with a cabinet full of old Krautrock vinyl I grew up on this album as a young kid/teen.
posted by ts;dr at 1:19 PM on March 25, 2014


For context they should also be forced to watch the 1991 VMAs.
posted by fshgrl at 1:20 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


Would you like to know more?

Good for her! I'm glad someone got out of the 90s MTV generation without od'ing.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:21 PM on March 25, 2014


Teens react to Sun Ra.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 1:23 PM on March 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


great art remains timeless and does not age

Sure does. Too bad about Nirvana though.
posted by drjimmy11 at 1:30 PM on March 25, 2014


If we're listing songs from 1991 that kids today probably haven't heard, well, I just linked to Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex" in a thread the other day, so instead of that, how about Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up"?

I'm pretty sure it was stuff like that, more than gangsta rap or "satanic" metal, that freaked out the Tipper Gores about our fragile little minds being warped. I was 10 in 1991, and "I Wanna Sex You Up" was to me and most kids my age just a goofy load of stupid. Mind you, maybe we were a bit jaded, having lived through George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" at age 6 and "Like a Virgin" at 3.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:37 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex" ... Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up"?

These two songs and George Michael's "Let's Talk About Sex" totally scandalized me circa age ten.

Actually I would love to throw some of the ubiquitous early 90s HIV PSAs at today's teens. Both to see their reaction and also because they probably need them.
posted by Sara C. at 1:39 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


you did not "live through" Like A Virgin at age 3, you lived through toy trucks and Spaghetti-Os, come on
posted by furiousthought at 1:40 PM on March 25, 2014 [10 favorites]


Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex"

Push It 4eva!

oh, my late teens and early 20s, you were so fun
posted by scody at 1:41 PM on March 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


This entry in the series is pretty adorable.
posted by mkb at 1:41 PM on March 25, 2014


Teens react to Swans
posted by the painkiller at 1:43 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Teens react to GG Allin.
posted by lowest east side at 1:46 PM on March 25, 2014 [14 favorites]


Teens react to Sun Ra.

It's two months short of the centenary of Sun Ra's birth (born: May 22, 1914). That kinda blew my mind.
posted by benito.strauss at 1:52 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


Are these teens people who aged out of the similar "kids react" series, or their older siblings, or what? Some of them look kind of familiar.
posted by Sara C. at 1:53 PM on March 25, 2014


I would pay cash to see Teens React to Tom Waits.

"Hey! He got that from Cookie Monster!"
posted by scody at 1:55 PM on March 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


Just please nobody link to a video titled "GG Allin reacts to teens".
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:59 PM on March 25, 2014 [9 favorites]


Next I want to see Teens React To Tool Videos, Especially That Goddamn One With The Marionette.

If they're anything like my teen self, it'll involve hiding in the couch cushions.
posted by cmyk at 2:01 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


"Teens React to Merzbow and Keith Vandermark"

Derp. Ken Vandermark, obvs. Though more people in my office freak out over Peter Brotzmann. (I like to just leave the whole iTunes on shuffle and see what comes up. Sometimes it's dirty '90s r&b! Sometimes it's evil skronk jazz!)
posted by klangklangston at 2:05 PM on March 25, 2014


... you had to have lived through the musical desert known as the 1980s to really appreciate it.

Husker Du. Replacements. Devo. Blondie. Brian Eno. Elvis Costello. Let me repeat: Elvis Costello. Nick Lowe. Gang of Four. Mazzy Star. R.E.M.. Suzanne Vega. Peter Gabriel (solo). The Clash. The Jam. Nanci Griffith. And that's just the typical college nerd-boy stuff. World music was becoming more available, and there were plenty of great old-school beats that I can't call out but got airplay.

Maybe the point is that unlike many of these Nirvana reached even the 12 year old in the middle of Idaho, but the 80s weren't no desert.
posted by benito.strauss at 2:06 PM on March 25, 2014 [19 favorites]


Also, if they want an authentic reaction from the teens, they should get them all pretty high first.

(And on Teens React to Flipper, they should probably huff some gas.)
posted by klangklangston at 2:06 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


You forgot XTC. That's a paddlin'
posted by thelonius at 2:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [9 favorites]


Also, if they want an authentic reaction from the teens, they should get them all pretty high first.



I think red shirt hair guy is way ahead of you.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


You notice he's the only one who really "gets" Nirvana?
posted by klangklangston at 2:13 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


I always thought 'GG Allin Auditions for American Idol,' would make a great piece of sketch comedy.
posted by jonmc at 2:15 PM on March 25, 2014 [9 favorites]


Red shirt dude also kinda insightful at predicting the future of rock. (Paraphrasing) "Rock is splitting completely. You've got pop-rock, and then hardcore metal, but not much in between. In the near future there's gonna be that one band that ties everything together." Right on. We're relying on your generation, kid. We have faith in you.
posted by naju at 2:31 PM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


"teens hear the entire song from that Hyundai/Arby's/Old Navy commercial."

I still remember how my friends posted to their facebooks the commercial for the Kia Soul that starred animated hamsters rocking out to "The Choice is Yours" by Black Sheep, which was one of the anthems of high school for us. They were so happy to see it, but not me. To me, this was confirmation that we were old. They are trying to sell us cars now.
posted by Hoopo at 2:35 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


okay, I just spent an hour watching old Salt-n-Pepa videos. How could I have forgotten Shoop?
posted by scody at 2:45 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


"I wish they made music like that now."

Yeah. Me, too.
posted by 3.2.3 at 2:52 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Teens react to Diamanda Galas.
posted by zippy at 3:03 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


Fuck I love Nirvana. I sometimes forget. And it seems that many of the teens of this generation are not quite as div as I had long suspected.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:09 PM on March 25, 2014


I liked everything about the kids' reactions to Nirvana, except the claim that contemporary music isn't any good. I think that claim in this thread, or about basically any time, ever, is also plain wrong. There has always been good music out there. My least favorite music decade of my life is the 80s, but that's mostly my own fault for not looking for the good music that was available.

I've said this numerous times before, but I really do find it remarkable that pretty much since the mid-90s pop music has been much less of the moment, where tastes begrudge anything older than, say, ten years. That certainly was my experience as a teen in the late 70s and early 80s, and that had been the case for teens from the 50s and continued into the mid-90s. But then, suddenly teen pop musical taste opened way up and there wasn't the stigma attached to "old people's music".

Part of that is really that in my day there was still in strong memory the break from crooners and big bands to rock 'n' roll. That really did represent a huge culture shift, as well as there being the lingering boomer hippie mistrust of their parents' generation. So there was this inertia of thinking that pop music necessarily excluded anyone older than their early twenties. Related to this, I think, was the repeating need to reinvent rock music, that anything less than a revolution was inauthentic, and so every five to ten years there was this sweeping revolution.

We haven't had one of those since the 80s/90s hip-hop and 90s alternative movements and, really, I think that this is a good thing. It's less exciting, sure, and it does mean that we haven't had these bursts of creative reinvention. But I think that, all told, the benefits of that are exaggerated, because the corollary is a discarding and distrust of what's come before. But that's a huge loss. And I think that the generations that have grown up since the mid-90s have benefited from the cultural acceptability of a much wider variety of music.

This can't be disentangled from the internet and digital music revolution, of course. I don't think either is the cause of the other; I think they've worked synergistically, sort of cementing this cultural shift to something much more eclectic and, ultimately, aesthetically informed.

I can't deny that I wouldn't be excited to experience a new pop music revolution. But I find that I'm happy and grateful that every year there is new and interesting music for me to discover and enjoy.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:19 PM on March 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


I liked everything about the kids' reactions to Nirvana, except the claim that contemporary music isn't any good. I think that claim in this thread, or about basically any time, ever, is also plain wrong. There has always been good music out there. My least favorite music decade of my life is the 80s, but that's mostly my own fault for not looking for the good music that was available.

In the teens' defense, I think it can sometimes be difficult to be inside the teenpop mass media bubble and see out into what interesting stuff is going on in music. I remember feeling exactly the same way from about 1997-2000, when, for one thing, a lot of the bands I got into in college were already together and putting out their early albums, and for another thing there was obviously plenty else happening.

That said, kids these days have the internet, and like duuuuuuhhhhhhh seriously it is not that hard to just go to pandora and put in a band you heard about and see what happens.
posted by Sara C. at 3:27 PM on March 25, 2014


I've discovered a shitton of great music just from following other mefites' This is My Jam feeds. Also, my musical neighbors on Last.fm, apparently almost all non-Americans, have introduced me to many good bands. The internet really is a fucking amazing tool for this purpose. God, if only the web had existed when I was a teen.

Actually, I'm certain 99% of my utilization would have been internet porn. But also music. Definitely some music in there in between the thousands of hours of porn. Hrmm. Come to think of it, maybe it's a good thing there wasn't the web when I was teen.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:34 PM on March 25, 2014


I liked everything about the kids' reactions to Nirvana, except the claim that contemporary music isn't any good. I think that claim in this thread, or about basically any time, ever, is also plain wrong. There has always been good music out there

agree completely, except for 1999. It's as if the cocaine gangsters who ran everything had a deal with Satan that demanded they unload a certain amount of toxic waste into culture before the Year Zero and they suddenly realized they were way short.

And I really tried to find good stuff in 1999 ...
posted by philip-random at 3:36 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


I want to see teens reacting to Pixies or Violent Femmes. Mhm.

And that one glorious Toadies song, "Possum Kingdom". Goddamn that is a great, creepy song. My 46-year-old wife and 40-year-old me, cranking that, singing as loud as we can along to the recording, driving down the road... that's fucking bliss. If anyone of any age hasn't felt that same bliss (whatever the song), then — sheeyit — they ain't lived yet.
posted by grubi at 3:46 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


also, Ziggy era Bowie
posted by philip-random at 3:59 PM on March 25, 2014


In high school in the late 90s I was really into glam era Bowie and murderous story songs and Glen Miller. I managed to hit the revival of Brit Synth/New Wave just as I started graduated, which made me almost hip and with it cause that led well into the neo-garage rock/roots return. Ah well.
posted by The Whelk at 4:05 PM on March 25, 2014


Ziggy era Bowie

My teen/tween nephews are split on Bowie. Eldest and Middle nephew don't like him; Youngest nephew (who also really likes Frank Sinatra and Count Basie) stumbled upon Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture on TV awhile back, and was all HOLY SHIT GREATEST THING EVER.
posted by scody at 4:07 PM on March 25, 2014


Yeah I still remember idly putting my Mom's copy of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust into my portable CD player with the big headphones on a whim and going "HOLY FUCK THIS IS AMAZING."

I had been listening to a lot of classic broadway scores at the time which I think is actually good background for appreciating said album.
posted by The Whelk at 4:09 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]




Showing my age up worse than anyone else, now I have this burning desire to see teens react to Spandau Ballet.
posted by Catch at 4:46 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


> Chasing Cobain in Washington State

King Solomon's Reef "is well known for its mac and cheese"?
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:07 PM on March 25, 2014


Teens react to Jandek.
posted by AJaffe at 5:08 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]



okay, I just spent an hour watching old Salt-n-Pepa videos. How could I have forgotten Shoop?

Along with "Push It," "Whatta Man" was their moment back in the day. I remember putting that on at a party in our first shithole apartment in East Bridgeport, and everybody got up and shook some ass.
posted by jonmc at 5:18 PM on March 25, 2014


Music was always better about 20 years ago when you're lazy because history curates it for us. Go back and look at pretty much any Top 20 list for any date, and it'll be anywhere from 95-100% forgettable crap.

When I was a young girl, I found new music by getting music magazines, sending away for other music publications and catalogs from the ads in the back of those magazines, slowly narrowing down my preferences by snail mail, going to record stores in person, tuning my radio obsessively looking for college radio stations and weird late night shows, going to clubs and concerts, etc.

It took weeks or even months sometimes, depending on the obscurity, between finding out about new music I wanted to hear and actually hearing that music. It takes 30 seconds now.

So yeah, get offa my lawn with your "There's no good music anymore," lazy teenagers. I'm damned near 50 years old and I still find great new music all the time. It's almost never in the Top 40.
posted by ernielundquist at 5:35 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Teens React to Merzbow and Keith Vandermark

Or just go back to Throbbing Gristle. Teens React to Ha-a-a-m-m-m-b-b-bb-u-u-uu-r-rr-gg-g-ge-e-e-rr-r L-a-a-a-a-ad-d-d-dd-yyy-y-yy-y. Be sure to include lyrics!
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:51 PM on March 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


Jesus Christ, this makes me feel about 103, even though I'm 36. Props to the kids in the video, though; they seemed to get it.
posted by Len at 6:06 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Yeah I still remember idly putting my Mom's copy of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust into my portable CD player with the big headphones on a whim and going "HOLY FUCK THIS IS AMAZING."

That warmed my heart. I'm currently obsessed with Bowie, listening to him every day for a few months now. "Aladdin Sane" as I type this, in fact.
posted by davebush at 6:12 PM on March 25, 2014


EMF, "Unbelievable"

Some young folk may have already heard it in this commercial. Except that came out nine years ago. So even the sellout commercial version of the song is ancient history.
posted by candyland at 6:42 PM on March 25, 2014


The Teenage Discovery of Bowie has got to be a rite of passage. For some, it subsides. For others... well, I discovered Diamond Dogs when I was fifteen or so and it's a rare day without a Bowie song in the mix.
posted by cmyk at 7:06 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


I'd like to see teens react to Parliament-Funkadelic.

Because they should.

And if kids want to see even the kids of way olden days go nuts at a pop star, the producers of this series should show them the old film of Sinatra playing the Paramount in 1942, along with those old WB cartoons where everyone goes nuts over Frankie and lays eggs and whatnot. I have also read that before that, Rudy Vallée also had his squealing young fans wherever he went in the mid-1920s. And then there was Franz Lizst!

Just how far back does the propensity go for teens to have shrieking swoons over pop stars?

I'm surprised at how many kids today like Ringo, and not just in this video. He was NOT POPULAR among my age cohort who were Beatles fans in the mid-to-late 80s. I was a John girl, myself. I will say Ringo's was the sweetest character in A Hard Day's Night. That scene of his by the canal just made me go "Awwww!" the whole time.
posted by droplet at 7:24 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


The problem with popular music is that every year there's a whole nother year's worth of it. I mean, in 1980 it was pretty easy to look back 25 years to Bo Diddley on the Ed Sullivan show in 1955 and draw a line from there to that brand new record "London Calling". (Diddley was even The Clash's opening act for much of their '79 US tour.)

But now it's practically 2015 and we're further from The Clash than The Clash were from Bo Diddley, but a "London Calling" tshirt is still a signifier (and a plot point in an episode of Orphan Black that I happened to watch last night) and the Bo Diddley riff, tortured and shredded and broken down and manipulated and recombined in a million ways is still central to rock music, which is now distinct from pop music, and there's TONS MORE of all of it.

And that's great! And such has it ever been, I suppose, thus the cliché "the test of time". I'm glad, I suppose, that Nirvana has withstood it and remains relevant to mopey romantics with angry hair and acne, but there was another record released the same week as Nevermind by a band that I suspect will in the long long run have a more lasting impact on a broader range of popular music -- Uncle Tupelo's "Still Feel Gone".

I'd like to see today's teens react to that record. And maybe not get it, because it was very much of its time. And that's OK.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 7:30 PM on March 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


> > The girl commenting that videos used to be normal and that it's weird that nobody is stripping in the Smells Like Teen Spirit video is really depressing.

That was the line that sold me on the whole clip. And why my opinion of music videos as a format went from neat to meh to seething hatred ennui.
posted by K.P. at 7:31 PM on March 25, 2014


I mean, y'know, I like looking at (half-)naked women as much as the next person. And coming of age in the shadow of AIDS and the Moral Majority made a bit of raunchiness on MTV seem wild, free, transgressive, etc.

Some guy said of Showgirls "That film makes me never want to see a female nipple again." And that's about how I feel after just a few minutes of exposure to any of the music-video channels on basic cable/Sky. What happened to the...everything else?
posted by K.P. at 7:47 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


but a "London Calling" tshirt is still a signifier

This was called into question for me a few years ago when I saw a kid (probably early teens) wearing a London Calling shirt in line at the grocery store. I said, "hey, cool shirt." He looked at me blankly. "Your shirt," I said. "The Clash?" He looked down and shrugged. "I've never listened to them," he said. In geeky middle-aged music fan fashion, I enthused, "oh, you should! They were great!" Thus ensuring, of course, that now he will never listen to the Clash.
posted by scody at 7:54 PM on March 25, 2014 [15 favorites]


Goodness me they are all adorable.

My personal favourite is ginger cat-eyed girl for her thoughtful precision and excellently quizzical expression when watching the KKK kid.
posted by Sebmojo at 7:58 PM on March 25, 2014


He looked down and shrugged. "I've never listened to them," he said.

I never imagined "wears a shirt for a band he doesn't like" would be a thing a person would do. Unexpected cultural clash!
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:21 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


scody, that makes me sad.
posted by pompomtom at 9:38 PM on March 25, 2014


He looked down and shrugged. "I've never listened to them," he said.

I encountered this a while back with a young guy who was wearing a Yes Tales From Topographic Oceans t-shirt. Turns out he'd found it in a thrift store and thought it was trippy. He was the nephew of a friend, so I burned him a data disc of early Yes stuff and insisted he listen to everything on it at least three times before passing judgment.

Maybe a year later he told me the Yes stuff didn't really do it for him, but it did indirectly get him listening to really early Queen.

Speaking of which, Teens React To Really Early Queen ...
posted by philip-random at 9:53 PM on March 25, 2014


teenage discovery of Bowie

The beautiful thing is, I still got to have this, even though Bowie was served up in my face by MTV and radio ("Let's Dance", "China Girl") when I was about 15. Because there were still Bowies to discover! The weird, folky Bowie of "Space Oddity" was where I really got that - a long way from the club sheen of his 80's hits.
posted by thelonius at 10:09 PM on March 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Looking back, I lived it as

What NIRVANA was (un/witting/consciously) cutting against, through and down--the musical and cultural zeitgeist the excellent song cites re:1991 in this thread capture, was most fully epitomized/presaged on November 12, 1990, when Milli Vanilli "Blame[d] It On The Rain" and admitted that not only did they lip-synch in concert, but that they had not even recorded the vocals on their albums.

YMMV.
posted by riverlife at 10:17 PM on March 25, 2014


Beatles time.
posted by buzzman at 10:30 PM on March 25, 2014


I was 21 when Nevermind came out and had already seen them twice by that point. Like any good cooler than you hipster I spent 2 months listening to nothing but Nirvana then moved on to the next Cool Thing (as I recall grunge was already dead at this point as Louder than Love and Superfuzz Big Muff and that one Melvins album preceded Nevermind) when they started playing Polly at The Gap. I was shocked and got drunk and ...other stuff...for like 2 days when he died, but for the most part it felt more like a media event at the time and I didn't think too much about the whole "voice of a generation" thing. Fuck, he was already rich and on the cover of People and shit, married to another celebrity, and clearly on a path of reckless indulgence and self-parody. He was slightly more relevant than but just as pathetic as Justin Bieber today.

Then I moved to seattle where it's like fucking Kurt Cobain Disneyland, with that thrift store sweater from the video being displayed behind glass in a museum with an $18 admission charge and the Kurt Cobain House of Death a tour bus stop.

But I have just enough detachment from What It Was Really Like back in the day to look back and think, yeah, those were really fucking tremendous songs, from a really pretty brave and talented kid and yeah, Cobain probably deserves to be the last "voice of his generation" we are likely to see in this media saturated post internet world. Even before seeing this linked video, I've really thought that it speaks volumes that kids still dig on him today. They sure don't do that with Elvis, or Lennon, or Morrison, or Sid Vicious.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:44 PM on March 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


I recall an MTV band interview right around, I guess, when In Utero came out. Cobain was wearing like a yellow mumu, and he refused to speak. It struck me as not being a stunt; there was a disturbing feel to his whole affect, and I remember thinking, this guy is really in a crisis.
posted by thelonius at 11:39 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


My fourteen-year-old nephew (who was born six years after Kurt Cobain died) asked me once if Nirvana was a heavy metal band. I said that, at the time, people really viewed them more as a punk band with poppy undertones. I conceded that, in a way, they were kind of responsible for groups like Good Charlotte that came later, but if they had known what was going to happen, they would have been very very sorry.
posted by jonp72 at 7:07 AM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


how about Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up"?

"Why is Kenny G and that black guy dancing with those two guys from the Dick in a Box video?"
posted by jonp72 at 7:17 AM on March 26, 2014 [3 favorites]


Teens react to Joy Division.
posted by sukeban at 7:52 AM on March 26, 2014


It's amazing how much airplay songs from 1990 forward still get on the radio. In 1994, the stations that were playing Nirvana were not playing rock from 1974. Today the stations playing the crap out of modern rock go back to 1991 as their cutoff point.

At least we've escaped the event horizon of that Dramarama song, I think.

And I'll spare you all links to Whitehouse and that SPK autopsy video.
posted by malocchio at 8:25 AM on March 26, 2014


Wait, I thought Interpol was the new Psychedelic Furs, not the new Joy Division.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:11 AM on March 26, 2014


They want to be Joy Division, they achieve Psychedelic Furs.
posted by klangklangston at 10:26 AM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


They want to be Joy Division, they achieve Psychedelic Furs.

They should be so lucky. I will fight the next person who disses the divine PFurs.
posted by FelliniBlank at 10:50 AM on March 26, 2014 [4 favorites]


Right there with you FB. *grabs a folding chair*
posted by Catch at 12:33 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


The Others react to Geronimo Jackson.
posted by Chitownfats at 12:35 PM on March 26, 2014


At least we've escaped the event horizon of that Dramarama song, I think.

Everyone who didn’t live in SoCal 20 years ago is saying "who?"
posted by bongo_x at 12:35 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Psychedelic Furs > Joy Division

"President Gas" is my jam

Enjoy your tape hiss
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:40 PM on March 26, 2014 [5 favorites]


"They should be so lucky. I will fight the next person who disses the divine PFurs."

You know they put out albums after Forever Now, right? I apologize for nothing.
posted by klangklangston at 12:40 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


first album's pretty strong. but the singer's voice didn't keep me interested for that long.
posted by philip-random at 1:05 PM on March 26, 2014


You know they put out albums after Forever Now, right? I apologize for nothing.

Don't make me torch your house or hurt you, man, because that would be wrong.

Meanwhile, I still can't decide if British Sea Power are the new Bunnymen or the new Armoury Show, but they're swell regardless.
posted by FelliniBlank at 1:06 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


You know they put out albums after Forever Now, right? I apologize for nothing.

I am totally going to find a way to make you listen to the entirety of Mirror Moves at the next L.A. meetup. I may even get up and do Richard Butler's goofy "miming the hands of a clock" dance to "My Time."
posted by scody at 1:13 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


I will grant you (and so will the Butler brothers, loudly) that Midnight to Midnight was not their finest hour, but every other note they produced was golden. The two post-Midnight albums (Book of Days and World Outside) have held up quite well, and I know this because I did a whole Furs/Spit retrospective last week.
posted by FelliniBlank at 1:16 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


I just had another listen to "Tubthumper" and it occurred to me, first, that it is basically "Timebomb" (which is off their last "non-sell-out" album) recast in a more melancholy mode - "Timebomb" is about proletarian resilience and becoming; "Tubthumper" is about proletarian resilience but mostly as endurance and memory. The two songs are very similar musically and both videos use some of the same techniques, but "Timebomb" is basically "there's something within regular people, they're not damp dynamite, there's something in our desire to be alive and joyful that can blow up all systems of repression", whereas "Tubthumper" is much more "there's something within regular people that will always resist destruction and remember itself".

Then I was also thinking - "Tubthumper" is a song someone writes when they're not a young punk anymore, when they have songs that remind them of the good times. It's funny, I'm older than Alice Nutter was when she sang on the thing, and when it came out the Chumbas seemed like such, you know, Senior Punks.
posted by Frowner at 4:36 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


My favorite interview with Kurt, conducted about eight months before his death. He's so lucid, friendly, engaging and forthright in this, unlike most of his other interviews although I can't really blame him for some of those given the interviewers/questions. I do get a little depressed every time I watch this though...I wish things had turned out differently.
posted by Devils Slide at 4:46 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Erica Ehm FTW!
posted by Sys Rq at 4:48 PM on March 26, 2014


Everyone who didn’t live in SoCal 20 years ago is saying "who?"

Everyone who did live in SoCal 20 years ago is saying "why?"
posted by benito.strauss at 5:27 PM on March 26, 2014


Everyone who did live in SoCal 20 years ago is saying "why?"

And many of us who've never lived in SoCal still dig the Dramarama song. They're like the kid brothers of Mott the Hoople.
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:40 PM on March 26, 2014


I gotta assume we’re talking about "Anything" but I actually listened to the Wonderamaland album a lot back then. I need to go back and check those last 3 albums out again, I remember liking them but forgot all about them.

They did cover "I Wish I Was Your Mother" but probably shouldn’t have.
posted by bongo_x at 7:16 PM on March 26, 2014


"I am totally going to find a way to make you listen to the entirety of Mirror Moves at the next L.A. meetup. I may even get up and do Richard Butler's goofy "miming the hands of a clock" dance to "My Time.""

If I want to be bored by a decent vocalist and lackluster mid-tempo feelz-songs, I can always dig out my Ultravox.

"They're like the kid brothers of Mott the Hoople."

I always thought that was Thunderclap Newman.
posted by klangklangston at 7:25 PM on March 26, 2014 [2 favorites]


If I want to be bored by a decent vocalist and lackluster mid-tempo feelz-songs, I can always dig out my Ultravox.

THEM'S FIGHTING WORDS
posted by scody at 7:27 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


…fine, my Ultravox after Systems of Romance.
posted by klangklangston at 7:31 PM on March 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Everyone who didn’t live in SoCal 20 years ago is saying "who?"

It's like you've never even seen "Nightmare On Elm Street 4".
posted by asterix at 7:27 AM on March 27, 2014


I never think of myself as having overly passionate musical opinions until a thread like this one comes up and I'm thankful the conversation wasn't taking place in person so that I was prevented from violence against people's whose community contributions I typically love.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:56 AM on March 27, 2014


It's like you've never even seen "Nightmare On Elm Street 4".

I’m trying to school myself in the arts, but many in many areas my knowledge is still lacking.

I’ve always been fascinated by the bands that had entirely different careers inside and outside of the range of KROQ’s transmitters.
posted by bongo_x at 3:56 PM on March 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Ha. Yeah, my girlfriend and I had totally different radio upbringings, since I could hear CIMX ("What, c'mon, everyone knows the Gandharva's 'First Day of Spring.'") and she was in Lansing and couldn't get it.

CIMX was our version of KROQ, with the legend going that the program director had started at X-ETRA, a border blaster in Tijuana, but gotten sacked for catching the board on fire with implied drug use. So he came up to Windsor and took an adult contemporary station into the "modern rock" format, and was nominally one of the first X-branded stations (i.e. 89X), especially one that was independent of Rick Carroll's KROQ format franchising.

It was a pretty good radio station for a long time, and was the first place to play Nirvana in the Detroit area, but by, like, '99, it had fallen off and was widely considered (read: my high school and early college buddies) poser bullshit.

I wish I could remember what the other great stations were — there was a late night show on WDET run by a woman DJ that was fantastic, and the Toronto NPR-ish station that got repeated so you could pick it up if you had a good antenna had fantastic overnight shows, including a lot of John Peel knock-off and some of the first long-form techno radio, which was a lot of fun. We had a guy in our office who would tape it overnight and then play it during the day, and it was sweet hearing, like, an hour-long Plastikman remixes outside of clubs.

(I wish I could find someone with Electrifying Mojo tapes so that they could be digitized and put up somewhere. That was Detroit radio that I was mostly too young for, but when I could catch it, it was fantastic.)
posted by klangklangston at 4:52 PM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


I am constantly amazed. REALLY? You're willing to fight over the psychedelic furs? REALLY? You do realize that's the band that did Pretty in Pink, right? You take that seriously?
wwwoooowwwww.
posted by evilDoug at 10:13 PM on March 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


"I am constantly amazed. REALLY? You're willing to fight over the psychedelic furs? REALLY? You do realize that's the band that did Pretty in Pink, right? You take that seriously?
wwwoooowwwww."


"Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste" by Carl Wilson

It's difficult to recommend this book too strongly.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:37 PM on March 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


You do realize that's the band that did Pretty in Pink, right?

You do realize that making snide remarks about bands you believe are beneath you actually sounds like one of the less-pleasant characters in the movie Pretty in Pink, right?
posted by scody at 10:46 PM on March 28, 2014 [4 favorites]


I once had a profound personal revelation when my Sansa MP3 player was putting Pretty In Pink into my ears.
posted by The Whelk at 10:52 PM on March 28, 2014


Aside from all the interesting issues raised in Wilson's book, which caused me to deeply rethink a whole bunch of things, I've also just found that as I've aged, that very few things that many people like but many other people think are just stupid and worthless are actually stupid and worthless. That's almost never true.

It's sort of the inverse of Sturgeon's Law, or really, its corollary. If 90% of everything is crap, then in relative terms, a lot of the stuff that people think is crap isn't any worse than a lot of the stuff that people think are worthwhile. As I'm much more positively-oriented than Theodore Sturgeon, I pretty much figure that there's value in most everything.

But my point is more substantial than that. What I've found is that claims of worthlessness are almost always made from ignorance. And, really, putting all the Bourdieuian stuff about cultural capital aside, there's a lot of good information in that Wilson book about what's really going on in Dion's music, the cultural context within which it exists. It looks like sentimental crap to those who aren't a part of a cultural context where it makes sense.

And that's so very often the case. This isn't just true with aesthetics and cultural products; indeed, what I usually have in mind when I think and write about these issues are more academic subjects, particularly in the humanities but also in the sciences. It seems like in all quarters there are snobs who declare those barbarians over thataway to be ignorant nobs, but what I keep discovering, as I've learned about new and various subjects over my life, is that most such things make a lot of sense and are interesting and worthwhile if you have the eyes to see it. It usually requires actually learning new things. And so, more and more often, almost all such scoffing, whether it be about some pop music performer or a book or film or a television show or a school of literary theory or art movement or a social science, such contemptuous criticism is apparent to me to be equivalent to "my kid could have painted that there expensive painting".
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:00 PM on March 28, 2014 [3 favorites]


I once had a profound personal revelation when my Sansa MP3 player was putting Pretty In Pink into my ears.

I know that’s a euphemism, but I can’t quite figure it out, I just know it was a good thing.
posted by bongo_x at 11:36 PM on March 28, 2014


I really want to see Teens React To This Thread.

If I had youtube searching skills there would be some clickbait here to YouTube of this timely, if dated, quote from Grandpa Simpson:
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what
I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.


Because it's as true then as it was 18 years ago.

Now, if you don't mind, I have clouds to shout at.
posted by Mezentian at 10:16 PM on March 29, 2014


"You do realize that making snide remarks about bands you believe are beneath you actually sounds like one of the less-pleasant characters in the movie Pretty in Pink, right?"

I've never seen the movie, but that's not a bad song. Bit of an '80s prom theme, but it's better on Talk, Talk, Talk.
posted by klangklangston at 12:13 AM on March 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


The original version on Talk Talk Talk is fantastic, one of the top early '80s tracks ever. The remade version for the movie was pretty limp. The movie itself was meh; definitely not the best of John Hughes' oeuvre (Hugheuvre?).

Alas, you must have gone to a much hipper high school for that to be your prom theme. I'm pretty sure ours involved Bryan Adams. (Though it wasn't for lack of trying on my part to campaign heavily for "People Who Died" by the Jim Carroll Band.)
posted by scody at 11:47 AM on March 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


I am constantly amazed. REALLY? You're willing to fight over the psychedelic furs? REALLY? You do realize that's the band that did Pretty in Pink, right? You take that seriously?

A) Perhaps you're unaware that "I will fight you" is a joky bit of Internet hyperbole commonly used when idly shooting the shit about arts and entertainment. If klang had smarted off about Graham Parker instead, I would have gone with the more severe "pistols at dawn."

B) Dude, maybe you were curing cancer or voting Republican or something in the early 80s, but like any self-respecting bookworm/barfly, I was hanging about various murky, grotty dancefloors and clubs, sporting gold lamé gloves and a truly atrocious Siouxieish haircut, and dating only guys who wore substantially more eyeliner than I did. So yes, in point of fact, I was then and am to this day serious as a fucking heart attack about the Furs, Bunnymen, Chameleons, Joy Division, Gang of Four, 'Mats, Bauhaus, etc.

(The best thing about that silly Hughes flick is The Rave-ups. The second best is James Spader.)
posted by FelliniBlank at 9:28 AM on April 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


I only know Squeezing Out Sparks for Parker. It's got a handful of just genius songs, then a bunch of stuff that just doesn't do it for me. I'm kinda curious about his earlier albums, but last time I went vinyl shopping looking for Parker, Squeezing Out Sparks was $8, and Stick It To Me was $45.

Honestly, though, I listen to Look Sharp more often — it's a fantastic album all the way through, and I pretty much never listen to any of Jackson's other stuff.

And of that era, I think Robert Palmer's Clues is actually the best of that bunch. Blue-eyed soul but produced by Gary Numan!

(The entertainment editor at Hustler was a pretty cool guy, and plays in an '80s cover band called Pacmaniacs, and as soon as I mentioned liking any of this stuff, I had burns of Psychedelic Furs and Joe Jackson's entire careers.)

"The best thing about that silly Hughes flick is The Rave-ups"

Apparently the guy behind them has a new album out. NPR loved it.

"So yes, in point of fact, I was then and am to this day serious as a fucking heart attack about the Furs, Bunnymen, Chameleons, Joy Division, Gang of Four, 'Mats, Bauhaus, etc."

During that time, I was in elementary school, but my parents were playing stuff like Shriekback and Laurie Anderson and a lot of REM and Talking Heads. But coming back to it later, that means that I just don't have enough of an identity thing going on to, say, suffer through the terrible Gang of Four albums at the end. But I do remember early Wire being a total revelation — I knew them from an Ideal Copy cassette.

And I've also always been more on the rhythm side — The Feelies, The Fall, Wire, Buzzcocks, Mekons, Teardrop Explodes, that's more of the early '80s stuff that I got into. I didn't really listen to Joy Division or Depeche Mode until college, when a coworker made a mix tape for me (he also introduced me to Flaming Lips and a bunch of Elephant 6 also-rans). Hell, I thought sounding like the Human League was an insult until I started dating my girlfriend.

I'll also cop that the first musical subculture I got really into was industrial, like high school freshman year, and a lot of my taste came from moving out and moving on from there. My aunt gave me a tape of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and I had a second cousin in Ministry, so while I've come to appreciate a lot of the precursors to them even more than I like either of those bands anymore, for a long time I was only really interested in electronics in music if it was still HARD and LOUD.

My parents also forbade a lot of pop music, on the grounds that it was "inappropriate," which I later came to understand really just meant that they didn't like it, so I had huge blind spots. Pretty much any radio hit from '86 through '95, I don't have contemporary memories of, especially hip hop. Nirvana was one of the few bands that broke through there — my dad bought Nevermind.
posted by klangklangston at 1:10 PM on April 2, 2014


"Alas, you must have gone to a much hipper high school for that to be your prom theme. I'm pretty sure ours involved Bryan Adams. (Though it wasn't for lack of trying on my part to campaign heavily for "People Who Died" by the Jim Carroll Band.)"

More that I've gone to numerous '80s Prom-themed parties, where that stuff gets played non-stop. I couldn't even tell you what the theme of my prom was aside from purple and teal.
posted by klangklangston at 1:12 PM on April 2, 2014


Apparently the guy behind them has a new album out. NPR loved it.

Jimmer Podrasky -- The Would-Be Plans! It's fantastic, one of my top ten of 2013.*

The other nine, apropos of nothing:

#1 all the way: Radical Face -- The Family Tree: The Roots
In no particular order:
Bowie -- The Next Day
Bill Callahan -- Dream River
Quasi -- Mole City
Wesley Stace -- Self-Titled
Frightened Rabbit -- Pedestrian Verse
Robbie Fulks -- Gone Away Backward
The Sadies -- Internal Sounds
Sam Phillips -- Push Any Button

Outstanding vault items: Waterboys -- Fisherman's Box; Paley Brothers -- The Complete Recordings

Honorable mention: Cass McCombs -- Big Wheel and Others
posted by FelliniBlank at 1:55 PM on April 2, 2014


The Feelies, The Fall, Wire, Buzzcocks, Mekons, Teardrop Explodes

Those are all swell combos too. I came rather late to Julian Cope, and Wire was one of those bands that fell between the cracks for me because they didn't get enough press in the provinces for a long time, but of course, as a Chicagoland kid, I was right there with Ministry from the beginning (although the bestest Chicago 80s band was The Service, who eventually morphed into the New Duncan Imperials). It's weird how "Eighties Music" is widely viewed with disdain because of gated snares or whatever, but once you start enumerating actual bands, most people with a modicum of taste will acknowledge that it was as good a decade as any other.
posted by FelliniBlank at 2:31 PM on April 2, 2014


Wire was one of those bands that fell between the cracks for me because they didn't get enough press in the provinces for a long time

I am forever grateful to this punk compilation I picked up at the one cool record store in town when I was about 13 or 14, because it turned me on to so many bands I would have never heard of otherwise living in Colorado in the early '80s. I remember playing Wire's 1 2 X U so many times in a row that my parents, who hardly ever objected to my music, finally had to order me to turn off the stereo for the night.
posted by scody at 3:50 PM on April 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


#1 all the way: Radical Face -- The Family Tree: The RootsBranches

(The Roots was the earlier 1st installment)
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:07 AM on April 3, 2014


God, this year I copped out — I got like 30gbs of jazz from my dad last X-mas, and have mostly just listened to that.

And most of my new wave education came from mixtapes made from jukebox 45s at a bar my parents frequented, which is why I assume that everyone has a deep affection for Our Daughter's Wedding.
posted by klangklangston at 5:16 PM on April 3, 2014


a deep affection for Our Daughter's Wedding

...who opened for the Psychedelic Furs the first time I saw them!

*the circle of life*
posted by scody at 5:29 PM on April 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


That Our Daughter's Wedding have more than one song is a revelation to me.

I still used to sing Lawnchairs Are Everywhere when I would broke that Terrible Real Estate Photos website (the name of which escapes me, but was started from someone here, as I later discovered).
posted by Mezentian at 9:56 PM on April 4, 2014


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